The Ghost Delusion

“You go around all the haunted houses in Britain in the dark, and if you can keep your shit together, that’s science for ya, yeah?” Enjoy this That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch that didn’t make it to the show:

Rebecca leads a team of skeptical female activists at Skepchick.org. She travels around the world delivering entertaining talks on science, atheism, feminism, and skepticism. There is currently an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it. You can follow her every fascinating move on Twitter or on Google+.

3 Comments

The link doesn’t work (at least in my browser, Opera 10.6.0 on WinXP), but cutting and pasting it got me there.

Great bit, focusing on the fact that Skepticism (or do you now spell it scepticism? You shall be assimilated!) is not the same thing as denial. Maybe Dawkins or someone should write a book about “What’s (probably) Real”, concentrating on denialist topics, what the evidence currently says, what possible new evidence would disprove currently accepted ideas, if it were to be discovered, how woefully short of evidence various deniers are, and more broadly, what the difference is between denialism and skepticism.

On the ghosts topic, I discovered when I woke up this morning that my bedroom TV is haunted. Strange small glowing spot in the picture tube. It moved around a little bit and changed colors occasionally. It turned out to be sunlight passing through a lilac bush outside my window (which was moving in the breeze, causing the precise path to change slightly, or vanish completely when a leave got in the way), then through a pin hole in the plastic surround of the A/C, then multiple reflections in the room, the last one off a shiny paperback book cover (which caused the color changes) before hitting the TV. That was about an hour ago; the sun has moved enough now to make the ghost vanish.